Here she began to develop the powers of her imagination. Style and technique were important to her as a free-lance illustrator/designer but even more significant was to find the idea, the one graphic symbol which would best convey the message. She developed a sample book containing ephemera she designed and printed using woodcuts and, after two years, she began a free-lance career as a commercial artist. Ellen Raskin then married, had a daughter, Susan, moved to New York City, was divorced, and took a job in a commercial art studio where she learned to prepare other people’s artwork for the printer.ĭuring this time, she learned to do paste-ups and color separations at work, while on her own, she experimented with typography using a bench printing press and ten fonts of type she had purchased. I was awed.” She changed her major to fine art and received a disciplined education in the fundamentals of anatomy, perspective, light and shade, color, and techniques of painting and sculpture. During the following summer she visited the Chicago Art Institute and saw the first major exhibition of nonobjective art: “I was astounded by what I saw. Raskin entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison at age 17 with the intention of majoring in journalism. She did a lot of coloring, copying and drawing but cannot remember ever drawing from her imagination as a child. “Being a good memorizer, I did well,” Raskin said. At the Berkeley symposium she spoke of her schooling as “rigid,” consisting of learning entirely by rote. at least fifty close relatives showed up at the annual family picnic held up or down the Lake Michigan shore.”Įllen Raskin describes herself as a “self-critical, running-scared, compulsive perfectionist” since the age of ten. I was also surrounded by real people, lots of them. My sister and I would spend weeks at a time acting out the lives of at least ten characters each.
“As far back as I can remember, I invented characters. had a singing range of three wrong notes, spilled ink on best dress, lost piano to a finance company…” and always had her nose in a book, according to her own account of autobiographical elements in her books, published in The Horn Book, December, 1978.
As a child during the Depression years, she “…had straight dark hair, tap-danced with two left feet. Her symposium paper, published in Wilson Library Bulletin, October, 1978, reveals, in part, Raskin’s perception of the role her Wisconsin background played in her development as a “bookmaker,” the word she chooses as most descriptive of her workĮllen Raskin was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on March 13, 1928. Illustrator, writer, and designer Ellen Raskin said this about her work at a symposium, “The Creative Spirit and Children’s Literature,” held July 11-15, 1977, at the University of California-Berkeley’s School of Library and Information Studies. A book is a package, a gift package, a surprise package - and within the wrappings is a whole new world and beyond.” “I try to say one thing with my work: A book is a wonderful place to be.
Notable Wisconsin Author Ellen Raskin by Ginny Moore Kruse
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